


To What Abode We Go

by Vermin_Disciple



Category: Ashes to Ashes, Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Angst, Background Het, Canonical Character Death, Creepy, F/M, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-03
Updated: 2011-05-03
Packaged: 2017-10-18 22:56:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/194211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vermin_Disciple/pseuds/Vermin_Disciple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Poor Sammy. Can’t know if he wants to find the answers he’s looking for until he finds him, but if he finds them, will he want to know?"</i> In which Sam discovers the disquieting truth, and makes his final decision. (Spoilers for A2A finale)</p>
            </blockquote>





	To What Abode We Go

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks are owed to [basaltgrrl](basaltgrrl.livejournal.com) for beta-reading, and to [talkingtothesky](talkingtothesky.livejournal.com), whose comment on a WIP meme convinced me that this was worth finishing. I originally wrote this for the Holiday Challenge at [1973flashfic](community.livejournal.com/1973flashfic), many months ago. I thought it was missing something, and promptly shelved and forgot all about it. I rediscovered it and filled in some gaps, and so here it is now, as complete as it's going to be.

_But ask not Bodies doom’d to die,  
To what abode they go;  
Since Knowledge is but sorrows Spy,  
It is not safe to know._   
-Sir William Davenant, “The Philosopher and the Lover: to a Mistress dying”

*

When Sam staggered into her life, banging on about time travel and car accidents, she had been equal parts concerned, intrigued, and incredulous.

The more she believed that _he_ believed what he was saying, the more concerned she became. _But_ , said a little voice in her head, _at least he’s honest with you._

It had always been too easy to see the good in Sam. It had always been too easy to ignore… the _rest_. The she could push to the back of her mind, as if it didn’t matter, in the greater scheme of things.

For seven years, it hadn’t. Not really.

But now… now he was lying to her.

Lying. Sneaking around. Hiding things. The smell of burning paper late at night, faint as a ghost in daylight.

It wasn’t anything so prosaic as another woman; it wouldn’t be, with Sam. With Sam, it might well be another universe.

*

“I’m worried about him, Gene,” said Cartwright. (Technically she was Tyler, now, but he had quite enough trouble with the Tyler he had, he didn’t need a second.)

Gene, not Guv. No other DC would dare.

But this was about Sam. That always changed the rules.

“Funny,” he said, gazing pointedly around the sitting room, “this doesn’t look like Blackpool.”

He’d known something was wrong the moment Sam had announced that he and the missus were going on holiday. Sam didn’t do holidays. Cartwright might be his wife, but he was married to the job. They’d not gone on holiday since their honeymoon, and that had been cut short when Sam got wind of that nasty triple homicide.

Gene might have let that one slip. And good thing, too: they’d caught the bastard before he could slaughter any other families.

“I’m meant to be at me dad’s house,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Instead she was here, in her neat little house, in _Sam’s_ neat little house, and she’d called him the minute Sam stepped out the door.

And she was calling him Gene, not Guv. They were allies, of a sort. They didn’t speak of it, but they knew. Just like they knew but never spoke of whatever it was that they were allied against.

“And where is Sam meant to be?”

They weren’t allied against Sam. Of course that wasn’t it. But they were allied against certain things that made Sam whatever it was Sam was.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell me.”

“Typical of him. Talks too damn much, all the bleeding time, except when you actually want him to.”

“He said there was something he needed to do. That he needed to be alone to do it.”

Gene didn’t like the sound of that at all.

*

The mud squelched between his fingers, at once slippery and viscous. He was digging into the bowels of the earth, bursting through her internal organs, searching for her swallowed secrets, and she wasn’t even screaming. Everything was silent, except for the pounding in his ears.

He had to know. He had to see it to be sure.

He had to see _him_ to be sure.

“Poor Sammy. Can’t know if he wants to find the answers he’s looking for until he finds him, but if he finds them, will he want to know?”

Sam didn’t look up. He continued clawing at the earth like some tiny, burrowing creature.

In the periphery of his vision, a familiar red hem inched into view. “Didn’t your mummy ever tell you not to play in the mud?”

“It’s shallow,” he heard himself say. “I don’t need a shovel.”

“You hate that most of all,” said the girl.

“Yes,” he admitted, and his fingers brushed against bone.

*

He hoped Cartwright wasn’t going to cry on him. She seemed to be holding up pretty well for someone whose nutter of a husband had gone off half-cocked yet again. But you never could tell, with birds.

“I think he’s been investigating something, on the sly, like,” she said. “He’s been sneaking files home with him. I haven’t got a look at any of them; I don’t know what he does with him, but I don’t think he puts them back where he found them.”

Gene knew, without a doubt, that they wouldn’t find them here, even if they turned the house upside down. Sam was doing this behind _his_ back too; he wouldn’t leave them here for him to find.

“Burned them, I’d wager.” What pain that must have caused his picky-pain soul, doing a vile thing like that.

Cartwright, to her credit, didn’t protest this. Instead, she squared her jaw and said, “What are we going to do about it?”

*

Sam’s fingers closed around the warrant card. He told himself that the way his hand shook was a result of the cold, nothing more, but that was bollocks.

He sat in the muck feeling the damp seep into his trousers. With a deep, steadying breath, he opened it.

PC Gene Hunt’s name stared back at him, the last remnant of a man (practically a child), who had died all those years ago. Except that he hadn’t just _died_. That boy had ceased to exist; someone else had been born in his place.

“I offered you a chance, you know,” said a clipped, matter-of-fact voice, somewhere above him. It belonged to a pair of well-polished shoes that seemed entirely immune to the wet earth around them. “I offered you a way out. You never would have had to find this, if you’d taken it.”

“You would have let them all die,” said Sam, with quiet fury.

“They’re already dead,” said Frank Morgan.

*

What they did, about the only thing they could do, was wait. Gene was not a patient man, and Sam spent so much time trying his patience CID was ready to turn it into a sport. He had been magnanimous enough not to notice the small betting ring that surrounded them: _fiver says the Guv finally does him in, this time_ …

But Sam would come to him, eventually. It was just a matter of time.

So when Sam showed up on his doorstep in the middle of the night, dried mud caked onto his clothing and a wild look in his eyes, Gene’s only surprise was that it happened so quickly. Sam liked to let things fester.

“I need your help, Gene,” he said, like he already knew that Gene would give him anything he asked for. Cheeky sod.

Cheeky, but not entirely wrong.

“Bloody hell, we’ve pulled stiffs out the canal that looked less done in.”

Sam looked himself over, as if he’d only just realized what a state he was in. “Sorry. I forgot I was – you see, I’ve been off,” he waved his hand about, ineloquently, “walking, driving, thinking about – things. I’ve been trying to work out what to do.”

“You never know what to do. You should have saved yourself the trouble and just asked me, first thing.”

And he knew Sam was badly out of sorts because not only did that _not_ get him a sarcastic quip in response, it didn’t even get him a patented Sam Tyler eye-roll. Instead, Sam looked absolutely wrecked. “I can’t tell you what this is about, Gene,” he said, eyes wide. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

They stared at each other, not saying anything, but speaking volumes nonetheless.

“What do you want from me, Sam?” he asked at last. He couldn’t read the answer on Sam’s face.

“I need to leave here, Gene. Disappear. I need you to help me do it,” he said. “I need you to trust me.”

Gene did.

That was all there was to it, in the end.

 

*

Wherever Sam had gone, he hadn’t returned.

Oh, she’d heard him come in that night, and she’d heard the brief shower and she’d heard the stairs creak as he tiptoed down to the sitting room to kip on the sofa, so as not to wake her. She’d seen him in the kitchen the next morning. He’d made her breakfast, and when he smiled at her she knew that it was over.

He had come back; he hadn’t come _home_.

When they pulled his car from the canal, there were no cold white fingers frozen to the steering wheel. There was no body.

She’d had a hunch – no, she’d _known_ , deep in the heart which kept on beating in spite of Sam’s incredulity – that there wouldn’t be. It was too fitting. Otherworldly Sam Tyler, dropped in from another universe and snatched back up again, quick as you like.

It made her stomach clench more with anger than despair.

Gene didn’t look surprised by it, either. He didn’t look grief-stricken, or shocked, or angry or disappointed. He didn’t look anything. His eyes were distant as the gates of Heaven.

Or the gates of Hell.

He left without a word to anyone, before anyone else dared to leave. This unusual show of faithlessness caught nobody’s eyes but hers. Everyone else was too busy looking the other way, avoiding that which they did not wish to witness, afraid of what their DCI might do to them if they did.

Gene brushed past her, too solid for a specter. Long after he was gone, she discovered the envelope in her pocket, unopened and unaddressed.

She finally returned to her own car, and sat in the driver’s seat, turning the envelope over and over again in her hands. She opened it with the pocket-knife she kept in her handbag.

A photograph fell onto her lap, and her eyes met, without any surprise at all, Sam’s precise, methodical handwriting.

 _I can’t tell you everything_ –

The sentences she skimmed provoked a twinge of impatience, and an ache of bone-deep longing for conversations she would never have. She flipped it over.

A fair-haired, stern-faced young bobby – practically a child – stared up at her, defiant in his black-and-white prison.

When she looked up, the car around her was gone – and the sky was nothing but stars.

 

  
_Finis_   



End file.
